Meta’s Louisiana AI Campus Is Planned at About 1,800 Football Pitches

Artificial intelligence lives in buildings, and the newest ones are measured in farmland and power stations. Meta’s data centre campus in Richland Parish, north-east Louisiana, is planned to stretch across more than 3,200 acres eventually, according to figures Louisiana officials gave in July. That is roughly 1,295 hectares, or about 1,800 football pitches.

The pitch count is TSN’s own calculation. FIFA’s recommended field of play is 105 metres by 68 metres, or 0.714 hectares, and 1,295 divided by 0.714 comes to about 1,814. Our 39-second explainer above walks through the size, the power and the water. This article sets out the figures behind it and how firm each one is.

The site is planned in two phases to 2036

Meta announced the expansion on 13 July 2026. The company said it is expanding the Richland Parish site to 5 GW in compute capacity, the largest in its fleet, with an investment of more than $50bn. The site will house Hyperion, which Meta calls its largest multi-gigawatt AI training cluster. Louisiana Economic Development described the same plan as nearly 10 million square feet and 5 gigawatts of IT capacity.

All of this is a plan. WWNO reported that officials said the full build-out, covering both phases, is not expected to be complete until 2036. The 5 GW is a design figure for computing equipment, not a measured power draw.

For comparison, Microsoft’s Fairwater AI data centre in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, which the company calls the world’s most powerful, covers 315 acres. On TSN’s same calculation, that is about 180 football pitches. Meta’s planned campus is roughly ten times larger.

Seven new gas plants are planned to supply it

The power for Meta’s site is planned by the local utility. In March, Entergy Louisiana set out a buildout paid for by Meta that includes seven new gas-fired combined-cycle plants “totaling more than 5,200 megawatts”, about 240 miles of new 500 kV transmission lines, battery storage at three locations and upgrades to nuclear plants. Entergy says the plants are built with the capability for future carbon capture and hydrogen co-firing. Meta says it will also help fund up to 2.5 GW of clean and renewable energy, and will match all of the site’s energy use with clean power.

Entergy says the agreement is “structured to ensure Meta pays its full cost of service”, and that it should save other customers about $2bn over 20 years. Both are the companies’ own claims. The plan was the first under the Louisiana Public Service Commission’s new fast-track framework, and WWL reported in October that Entergy was still seeking the commission’s approval for new generators at the site.

Three power numbers measure three different things

Three large power figures now circulate for this one site, and they are easy to confuse. In October, TSN reported Meta’s 4,500 MW Louisiana load. That figure came from Entergy Louisiana’s chief executive, Phillip May, at a Public Service Commission hearing in early October. According to The Center Square, May said the site is expected to draw 4,500 megawatts of electricity, and that Meta expects to use close to that almost continuously. WWL Louisiana reported that a grid operator report in September had already listed 4,500 MW of new load at a substation planned next to the site. New Orleans, by comparison, peaks at just over 1,100 MW.

So 4,500 MW is demand: how much electricity the utility expects to deliver to the site. The 5 GW is Meta’s measure of computing capacity, the size of the equipment the campus is designed to hold. The 5,200 MW is supply: the combined rated output of the seven gas plants Entergy plans to build. Power stations are not run flat out every hour, and utilities keep spare capacity for maintenance and peaks, so supply and demand figures are not meant to match one for one.

One puzzle remains. A data centre’s draw from the grid usually includes cooling and other overheads on top of its computing load, yet the 4,500 MW figure is lower than the 5 GW one. No public document explains the gap, which could reflect differences in timing or in what each figure covers. The contract details remain confidential. Sameer Doshi, a lawyer for groups opposing the new plants, told WWL that given the money at stake, “there should be greater public transparency”.

Water use depends on the cooling design

Water is where the figures vary most. Microsoft says more than 90% of Fairwater’s capacity uses closed-loop liquid cooling, which is filled once during construction and then reused “with no evaporation losses”. The rest uses outdoor air, switching to water only on the hottest days. On that basis, Microsoft claims the site’s annual water use is “roughly the amount of water a typical restaurant uses annually”. That is Microsoft’s own comparison, and TSN has not seen independent figures to test it.

Peak days look different from an annual average. In December 2024, before Fairwater opened, Microsoft’s Steve Solomon told Wisconsin Public Radio that its Mount Pleasant data centres would have a peak daily use of about 350,000 gallons on the hottest days, with cooling water used only from May to September. Neither Meta’s July announcement nor the state’s release gives a water-use figure for Richland Parish, though the state says Meta plans to return all of the facility’s water consumption to local watersheds.

Britain’s AI Growth Zones work at a smaller scale

The UK is chasing the same industry on a different scale. The government’s newest designations come with strict conditions. In January it named Lanarkshire an AI Growth Zone, where DataVita plans more than 500MW of on-site power within four years, drawn from renewables, with waste heat possibly going to a nearby hospital. That is a tenth of Meta’s 5 GW figure, although the two are not measured the same way. Not every bid succeeds: the UK turned down a 1.2GW proposal at Drax in North Yorkshire.

Elsewhere, governments are reshaping rules around these sites. South Korea plans faster permits for AI data centres, and President Trump has said big US data centres should make their own power, though no order has been published. For a sense of what all that electricity does, TSN’s explainer on the energy behind one AI query scales a single question up to millions.

The next milestone is the Louisiana commission’s decision on Entergy’s plants. That will show whether one company’s AI campus can be powered on these terms without leaving the bill with everyone else.

Sources

1. WWNO, “Meta expands Richland Parish data center project”, 14 July 2026
2. Meta Data Centers, “Deepening our investment in Richland Parish, Louisiana”, 13 July 2026
3. Louisiana Economic Development, “Meta Commits More Than $50 Billion for North Louisiana Project”, 13 July 2026
4. Entergy Louisiana, “Entergy Louisiana announces a new agreement with Meta that will deliver an additional $2B in customer savings”, 27 March 2026
5. The Center Square via New Orleans CityBusiness, report on Meta data centre power demand, 7 October 2026
6. WWL Louisiana, “Meta data center needs more than four times New Orleans’ peak power”, 8 October 2026
7. Microsoft, “Inside the world’s most powerful AI datacenter”, 18 September 2025
8. Microsoft On the Issues, “Made in Wisconsin: The world’s most powerful AI datacenter”, 18 September 2025
9. Microsoft Local, “Understanding water use at Microsoft datacenters”
10. Wisconsin Public Radio, “Microsoft says new technology will save water at Mount Pleasant data center development”, 11 December 2024
11. FIFA Publications, Football Stadiums Guidelines, “5.3 Pitch Dimensions and Surrounding Areas”
12. GOV.UK, “More than 3,400 jobs and targeted support for local communities to help tackle the cost of living as Lanarkshire named latest AI Growth Zone”, 29 January 2026

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